Father and son team Laurie and Lawson Ayers are out to prove Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the right place to mine digital cryptocurrencies.

Featuring six high-powered graphics cards and a desktop computer, the family crew have spent the past four months and about $4000 building their above-ground mining machine.

It works by uploading data to maintain the stability of the Ethereum Network, a decentralised app-building platform.

The entrepreneurs, who operate as part of a pool of about 8000 worldwide, get rewarded by sharing in the network’s currency of the same name, an alternative to the better known Bitcoin, virtually mining the digital bullion.

Lawson, 17, first dabbled in digital currencies around three years ago, buying $200 of Bitcoin, only to sell it the next day.

At the height of Bitcoin’s recent boom in December the portfolio would have been worth about $8000.

“I kind of regret that,” he said.

But the embarrassment did not stop Lawson approaching his businessman father with a new idea.

“As soon as we started to see a bit of potential in it, dad thought ‘let’s put in X amount of money and let’s buy the parts of the machine and use it as an experiment and see if it can do anything profitable’,” he said.

The price of a unit of Ethereum a year ago was about $US12. It peaked in mid-January at $US1385 before coming back to around $US840 as of yesterday.

“Back when the market was a lot better it was (making) roughly about $200-300 a week,” Lawson said. “Now that the market’s down a bit it’s still about $150-200 a week.”

He said the main cost of the operation was power. The rig chews up about $8 worth a day.

“What we’re doing to try and counter that is using solar power,” he said.

“That's a main thing of what we’re doing because Kalgoorlie has 290 days of cloud-free solar energy.”

Gold miners have expressed concerns that the popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum could have a deflationary effect on the price of the precious metal.

They are worried millennial investors will see the currencies as a store of value if the volatile commodities stabilise, undercutting demand for the yellow metal.

But Laurie, best known as the proprietor of Boulder’s Recreation Hotel, sees the famous Diggers and Dealers Mining Forum in August, which brings 2000 delegates from around the world to Kalgoorlie-Boulder, as the perfect place to show off the family’s investment.

“The plan at the moment is to keep this up and running until Diggers to get some hard data about how it’s performing so we have a platform to present to people to say this is an investment opportunity,” he said. “It’s a novelty, but it happens around the world and there’s shedloads of these.”

Naysayers, including some of the world’s top bankers and fund managers, have warned cryptocurrencies are a bubble bound to burst, warning investors from investing heavily.

Lawson said he was happy to experiment and see whether it could become more than a hobby.

“As an investment I wouldn’t say put your life savings into it, but I’m certainly more than happy to put some money in and just see where it goes, to be honest,” he said.